There are several lengthy, furious, deliberately alienating diatribes from the Jamaican feminist poet Staceyann Chin, whole sections in French and Steve Reich-style phase-shifting sound collages. All of this does a slight disservice to some excellent songs. [Sep 2024, p.37]

It's the restlessly inventive guitars, from silvery solos to swaggering glam rock, where Metallica find ageless redemption. [Jun 2023, p.32]

The songs' real power comes from a sense of foreboding that undercuts the easy listening. [Dec 2016, p.30]

Leaning lightly into their love of R&B on the likes of “Proof” and “Stevie”, and relaxing into expansive, stoned-in-the-sunshine grooves on pulsing lead single “Champion” and “Like Sweetness”, it’s a perfect goth summer record. [Jun 2022, p.34]

Despite its heady beauty, a gloomy fatefulness also shapes this set. [Mar 2017, p.30]

Sidi broadly draws on the same blues traditions Ali Farka Toure, but there are subtle differences here, too.[Jan 2014, p.78]

The songs are all traditional but are given a cool Scandinavian edge. [Mar 2013, p.75]

The Follower delicately shifts the emphasis from trance to techno, continuing the slow descent into darkness begun with 2013's Cupid's Head. [May 2016, p.73]

An LP of spooked delicacy and wheezy, wayward charm. [Jun 2003, p.104]

Throughout the record there's a thoughtful restraint tot he compositions, swerving back and forth between quiet euphoria and shell-shocked dystopia. [Aug 2018, p.30]

Here, the Southern rock template of Modern Blues is embellished with loops and 1970s soul stylings. The mood is up. [Oct 2017, p.40]

Helm seems constrained within the immaculate settings, only intimating the emotional lift-off the material yearns for. She makes a deeper connection with the newly penned "Heaven's Holding Me," delivering the LP's most heartfelt, uplifting performance. [Nov 2018, p.30]

There are further pointers to the record serving as a noisy epilogue, its energy and venom a reminder of when they, and their devoted following, were much younger souls. [Sep 2024, p.39]

The album presents the sound of masters at work, not thinking about their legacy, just doing the work. [Nov 2015, p.83]

Gaspard Auge and Xavier de Rosnay balance their belligerent side with a refined, progressive sensibility, a side increasingly foregrounded on Woman. [Dec 2016, p.30]

The resulting confluence of country, soul, gospel and R&B is a delight, Langford's originals imbued with a keen sense of time and place. [Dec 2017, p.23]

It strips out their usual psychedelic sprawl, leaving something leaner and more insistent, if no less Technicolor and joyously hypnotic. [Nov 2014, p.80]

This third album sees him turn to songwriting for the first time as he channels his inner Lou Reed for a freewheeling take on New York art-rock. [Oct 2013, p.83]

It's confident work, with faith in the power of a few elements. [Oct 2012, p.79]

Another dazzling yet soulless smorgasbord of bold, modern pop composition that mixes the latest AI with more old-school contributions from Lee Renaldo and Jim O'Rourke. [Nov 2023, p.31]

A delightful, horn-infused love letter to Morrissey's best solo work. [Apr 2016, p.76]

If Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix was the album that gave Phoenix everything they'd always strived for, Bankrupt! is the record that finds them trying to come to terms with it all. [May 2013, p.80]

Tosca is now... a band proper as well as a studio concern, and the change shows. [Jul 2005, p.106]

While at times her guitar rages filthily. She branched out lyrically too. [Oct 2014, p.79]

Their unfussy but subtle playing embellishes the simplicity of Nash’s melodies, while experience brings renewed pathos to songs like “I Used To Be A King”, “Man In The Mirror” and even something as straightforward as “You’ll Never Be The Same”. [Jul 2022, p.30]

A set of soft-focused pip imbued with simple but stickable hooks and emotional honesty reminiscent of Brendan Benson or Elliott Smith. [Feb 2025, p.34]

These immersive, synth-driven compositions may never match the brooding atmosphere of the filmmaker's early scores like Halloween and Assault On Precinct 13, but still have much to commend. [Mar 2015, p.73]

It's unquestionably a more electronic record, but the band show that they still know how to make a racket. [Mar 2025, p.33]